A foundational text for feminist philosophy and queer theory, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity offers a collection of essays that develop a post-structuralist analysis of the sex/gender distinction. Beginning from Simone de Beauvoir’s pronouncement that one is not born but becomes a woman, Butler argues as follows: If being a woman is not something you just are by birth and biology, but something you become given time and socialization, then the question is how that gender is taken up — and what happens when it fails to take. From this, Butler develops her early theory of gender performativity, an analogy for how gender is taken up by each of us as we become ourselves.

Before Butler’s theory of performativity, the prevailing belief was in a necessary and causal connection between sex and gender. If this was the case, then social norms rewarding and punishing gender variations would not be necessary. It wouldn’t be possible to not act one’s sex, and any and all expressions of identity would be correct by definition. The process of becoming one’s gender would be automatic, and one would always already be the woman one comes to be, making the distinction between sex and gender irrelevant and nonsensical. In her deconstructive move, Butler argues that when sex is taken to be the biological fact upon which culture elaborates gender (or gendered norms), sex is produced as the origin and source of said gender norms. But sex is constructed on the basis of gendered norms, so it seems that we have entered a circular play of self-reinforcing logic.

One of Butler’s most important insights is that the lynchpin holding together the sex/gender dichotomy is sexuality. How does one become a woman, and how is that process socially overseen? It is through the manifestations and expressions associated with heterosexuality and life cycles tied to reproduction. Compulsory heterosexuality (see Gayle Rubin on this concept) creates the illusion of a causal link between sex and gender, and compulsory heterosexuality is the social system by which the man/woman binary is reinforced and maintained.

These are just two of the ideas that begin in Butler’s Gender Trouble, ideas about the social construction of gender that have by now become all-pervasive: gender performativity, the deconstruction of the sex/gender division, and compulsory heterosexuality.

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